How to (not) take political sides

7 November 2018

You are astonished how we’re displaying disputed areas? You don’t agree with how we labelled Crimea being part of the Russian Federation? Let’s clear some things up, then!

Working with data is fun, but also challenging at times. It requires a lot of time, investigation skills and reading to find official statements, governmental assessments and trustable sources which conform to the mindset of over 7 billion people worldwide. If this wasn’t already difficult enough, the result of this research needs to be put on a map. To be frank, it is sheer impossible to display disputed areas in such a way that none of the parties affected by this dispute are satisfied, let alone all the newsrooms worldwide who are reporting about the happenings there.

Crimea

With the latest incident near Crimea a lot of maps were created, and we got several requests from our clients to correct the way we display Crimea. First of all, we’d like to make clear that MapCreator does not take any political side. Second, the mapping platform Maps4News is only the interface which allows you to display data and maps the way you want to. You can manipulate yourself – to a certain extent – what your map looks like once being published.

Data provider HERE

As you might know, we retrieve a lot of our data from HERE, one of our data providers. HERE is also the data provider in this case. HERE is displaying disputed areas according to who is controlling the respective area, which they claim to be is the international view. We are not taking any decisions in that matter. However, Maps4News does offer you to work with the “Disputed Areas” vector layer, so you can highlight these areas with a special polygon. Next to that, downloading the map as a vector file gives you even more options to adapt the map according to your point of view.